1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to wall hangings used for decorative purposes, and more specifically to a decorative wall hanging having the design of an object such as a Christmas tree on its outwardly facing wall hanging, a series of openings through the surface adapted to receive and hold ornamental devices such as electric lights, and instructions for properly installing the ornamental devices in proper order on its inwardly facing surface, the entire wall hanging being designed to stretch flat to hang on a wall or to compress to a smaller size for storage.
2. Description of Prior Art
It has become the widely accepted practice for those who celebrate a specific holiday, such as Christmas, to decorate their houses with a tree erected in one of its principal rooms. In the case of Christmas, it is traditional to use an evergreen tree for this purpose, and for centuries such trees have been grown and cut down or dug up live, transported to a selling area, and bought and brought home by the celebrants. Due to the nature of the marketplace, this has often resulted in either a large glut or shortage of such trees available at Christmas, and it has always resulted in a disposal problem after the holiday of enormous proportions.
There have been further problems caused by the trees drying out indoors and losing their needles or becoming fire hazards, and as a result of this, starting in the 1960ties, imitation trees of a plastic such as polyvinyl chloride were introduced and have become popular. While resolving many of the former problems, these plastic trees are expensive, require careful and bulky storage, and have to be carefully and time consumably erected for use. As house rooms continue to become smaller and more crowded with furniture, the main problem with plastic trees as with natural trees, is that they require a considerable amount of floor space for their use and this often is not possible, or at the very best causes inconvenience.
In an effort to deal with this space problem, designs of half-round trees made of plastic have been recently introduced. These half-round trees are designed to hang on a wall, and as a result the space problem has been alleviated but the problems of storage and erection persist.
It was against this background that the present invention was developed as a wall hanging to use no floor space whatsoever, to be foldable or rollable for compact storage, and to be quickly flattened and hung on a wall when taken from storage. These characteristics would be typical of nearly any wall hanging, and in fact, wall hangings with Christmas tree designs have been available recently with small ornaments and lights hanging from their surface. The problem with any such tree, however, is one of appearance, because the lights commonly used to decorate Christmas trees are made as sets of lights connected by electric wires, and when the lights are hung on the tree surface, the wires detract from the visual appearance and have been difficult to position and control.
This present invention solves this problem by providing a series of carefully spaced and sized holes through its surface, which holes receive and position the lights which are inserted in them from the inwardly facing surface of the wall hanging. Thus the lights are held in the outwardly facing surface of the tree in exactly the desired position, and the wires connecting them are concealed behind the wall hanging.
In a preferred embodiment of this invention, corrugated cardboard sheet is adapted as the basic material for the wall hanging. This material has the advantages of being of sufficient rigidity to support the lights when inserted into their corresponding holes, is relatively inexpensive, can be fabricated on presently available equipment, can be printed or screened on both sides, is durable, and can easily be folded down to a compressed size for storage. The use of such a material as an automobile sunshield is taught in U.S. Pat. No. 4,202,396 to Abraham Levy and it has proven both popular and practical in such products, although no suggestion of its use as a foldable wall hanging is made there or elsewhere.